Malevolent H-1B Visa Employee (India) Sabotages Mortgage Database at FANNIE-MAE

In a story that should be in "first men on moon" typeface above the fold at the Washington Post, instead we find a story at the DC Examiner as well as all over the rest of the WWW: Ex-Fannie Mae worker charged with planting computer virus.

Rajendrasinh Makwana, an Indian citizen and Gaithersburg resident, is out on $100,000 bail. Makwana was fired from Fannie Mae on October 24, 2008 for unauthorized changes to system settings without permission from his supervisor.

It would seem that in the course of checking over his recent scripting, engineers discovered a "trojan horse" script that would have activated in January 31, 2009, and would have locked legitimate users out of the system of over 4000 servers to which Makwana had superuser access. After the lockout, all of the data in the servers' databases would have been overwritten with zeros. These databases, of course, are primarily mortgage data.

"Had this malicious script executed, engineers expect it would have caused millions of dollars of damage and reduced if not shutdown operations at Fannie Mae for at least one week,” said FBI agent Jessica Nye in a sworn statement. “The total damage would include cleaning out and restoring all 4,000 servers, restoring and securing the automation of mortgages, and restoring all data that was erased.”

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As if the economy wasn't already in bad enough shape, the damage this could have done is incalculable. Literally, incalculable. We already don't have enough information on the ownership of the "tranches" of the mortgage-backed securities, and the so-called "Toxic Assets" problem is one of not knowing who all exactly owns any given mortgage, especially if it's a so-called "Option ARM" (adjustable rate mortgate). This would have only thrown more ink into the muddle, as it were.

This sort of information-based attack is the equivalent of the September Eleventh tragedies. It's low-likelihood, but very high risk.

It's time to massively reduce the number of persons admitted on the H-1B Visa program. As more and more American and Canadian companies are shrinking their workforces, there is a profound surplus of competent American and Canadian software engineers. We have no need to hire from abroad, especially not from countries that see us as their primary rivals and competitors, and which have anger and revenge as acceptable within their traditions.